Chapter 11: The Truth About Death

In this world, all the data of a person from birth to death were controlled, and an algorithm could even calculate the trajectory of the person's development in the next ten years. In the wasteland era, when artificial intelligence was developed to the extreme, every human being was just a string of code in the "it" database. According to some messy novels Janet had read, the artificial intelligence was a supervillain. Janet couldn't be sure where this Prometheus stood at the moment. What was the reason it chose itself? Did what happened now have anything to do with the death of the original owner? Janet asked, "Can I say no?" She's made enough money to get by on it. She didn't have to deal with the contaminant. She could hear that there were very many risks associated with the work here. Maybe this place even had something to do with the original owner's death. Lynn froze, obviously not expecting Janet to ask that question. She quickly regained her smile, "Of course. You'll have to go through the confidentiality process when the time comes." Lynn said, "I would suggest you stay, though. With your current savings, you'll only get one shot of the gene potion, and it won't last a single session." It was the best job for Janet; the pay was good, and Janet was comfortable with it. There was no reason for her to refuse it to be correct. "We won't force you." Lynn said the last word, "We'll wait for your good news." It was sundown when Janet changed into her regular clothes and walked out of the cleaning center clutching her materials. Outside, the incinerator was still burning, and there was a steady stream of garbage trucks as all two hundred and sixty regions of the Commonwealth sent their garbage to Sector 103. The incinerator in front of us was made in the shape of a giant robot, as tall as a hundred-story building, and standing underneath it gave me the illusion of looking up at a giant. It was said that this was originally a kind of city-guarding robot used in wartime, but after retirement, it was used to dispose of garbage. The incinerator fire glowed around the clock like a beacon in the darkness, illuminating the distance. Janet froze. She realized with uncanny clarity that she had entered another world. A wasteland world made up of high-tech, contaminant, a world where technology was advancing rapidly on the one hand but was so barren and chaotic in the corners. On the one hand, order-keeping; on the other hand, chaos and disorder. And there's a world beyond the high walls that Janet hasn't even seen. Janet transferred the rent to Bonnie and made various contributions. Currently, she still has a balance of 671,200 EAC left. Janet didn't go home after all this. She turned around and went to another place, the abandoned garbage room. This was the first place Janet saw when she woke up, fifteen kilometers from her home. The place was deserted, and by the time Janet arrived, it was long and dark inside, with very little light. The smell of mold and mildew hit the garbage room. Janet didn't have a flashlight with her, so she thought about it and put on the employee bracelet Lynn had given her. Sure enough, this would illuminate. A warm yellow light came on, and you could even adjust whether it was a low or high beam. Janet scanned the area, and a lot of scrap iron was piled up inside, with dozens of discarded cyborgs sprawled in the corners. In her world, iron and steel could be recycled. Surely no one would be left deserted, and collecting scrap could fetch a lot of money. But the scrap iron was piling up in the junk room. Janet thought back to the piece of iron in her abdomen, irregular, about the size of a palm, with jagged edges. Whoever killed her at the time must have found a random piece of iron and killed her. The cause of death was easy to deduce, but what was the killer's motive? The original owner was only 19 years old and a mechanical university student. And she was only a fifth-class citizen remnant. She had no money and no resources. The only thing that could be exploited is her spiritual value. But Janet didn't know if her spirit value was high because the original owner was high, or because she was high, or if the system imposed it. She woke up at that time, and based on the original owner's scattered memories, she found a vending machine a kilometer away and bought a shot of a potent healing agent. The memory was confusing. She had too many things to deal with at that time. She couldn't recall many details. Janet sat in the place where she had "died" and tried to remember what had happened that day. She looked up and realized that the roof of the garbage room was in disrepair and had a hole in it. It was raining acid rain when she collapsed here, and she could see the sky from there. The original owner was lying next to a pile of discarded steel, looking at the acid rain sky, bleeding to death. Janet sat there for a while and found nothing. Janet was about to get up when suddenly her movement froze, and there were a few drops of blood in the corner. She still maintained her seated position, a view that allowed her to see low enough. There is a small, crooked line of writing at the corner of the scrap metal and the wall. Janet was sitting uselessly. The original owner was dying, and her perspective was lying down. She lowered herself and carefully plucked away a piece of scrap iron, and there was a sentence on the corner of the mottled wall. "The end is near," Janet whispered the words. "You and I are all ants." "The end is near, and you and I are all ants. Janet suddenly froze. "The end is coming!" "The end is coming!" "You're just like me." "You will become like me!" Those were the words Fishman had told her before he died. The Fishman was half-dead and had to crawl towards Janet and say a few inexplicable words to her. At that time, Janet thought it was a manifestation of spiritual pollution, but now she seemed naive. The fisherman's words, more literally, were, "The end is near, and you and I are all ants." The fishman is a contaminant, so, understandably, he would say this, but why are these words in the place where the original owner died? What exactly was the cause of her death? If Janet hadn't traveled here, the original owner dying here wouldn't have been discovered. Even if she had been found, she would have just been thrown into an incinerator, and the news wouldn't even have reported it that day. Janet's first thought was to tap on her employee bracelet. She was going to check the cleaning center's intranet. Lynn said that her video was uploaded to the intranet, and if the Fishman had said something so bizarre to her, there would have been a discussion in the forums. Checking out the system requires logging into an employee ID. Janet would have to join the Sector 103 Cleaning Center if she looked at it now. Janet immediately chose a job title without hesitation and briefly filled out the entry information. The login was successful. The employee bracelet automatically played a mechanical voice: Congratulations for joining us. Janet clicked on the public forum for the cleaning center. The top post in the forum was shocked that a probationary newcomer had a spirit value of 1200! Janet "........." Immediately following the following post-learning materials, which are for internal circulation only, is the entire process of purification of the last train after the disappearance of the d-rated contaminated area. Janet clicked in to watch the video, which was spliced from her helmet view with Carter's. She fast-forward all the way to the Fishman and herself beating each other up on the railroad tracks. Janet's helmet was cracked from the smashing, the camera broke, and the radio picked up a lot of giggling and electricity. Immediately after that, Janet kicks Fishman into the subway, and Fishman is run right over by the subway. The next scene should show Janet standing in front of the platform with a fire axe in her hand as Fishman crawls towards her step by step. But the video ended here. The next moment of the scene was the train running the fishman into the ground. Immediately afterward, the Fishman died, and the spores that had been contaminated precipitated out. Janet watched it again and realized that the conversation between the Fishman and her was indeed missing from the video. The video had actually been edited. Who had done this? Could it be Prometheus? What did it do this for? A ding sounded in Janet's head. Congratulations on triggering the side quest—finding the truth about your death. This quest will be long-term and can be paralleled with other side quests with great rewards. Failure of the mission will result in zero life value. The current progress of the search is 5. Please work harder. Janet "SHIT" She should never have come to this dump. If she failed this mission, her life value would be zeroed out. Janet suddenly realized that the logic of this system was in line with the logic of reality. Janet's "death" might have something to do with the reason Prometheus chose her. If someone was trying to kill her, Janet not only didn't die, she ended up in the Cleaning Center. She would have been murdered a second time. So Janet must find the truth before that happens, or she will die again. Janet needed to get into the cleaning center and become a full-time employee if she wanted to find the clues so she could get in touch with Prometheus. And also gain access to the next contaminant. Well, great! She could happily go sweep up trash again. Janet took a picture of the corner of the wall with her para brain to leave a record. Then, she used the iron again to scrape all the writing off the corner. Suddenly, she heard a faint noise outside. "Who is it?" Janet's first impulse was to copy an iron bar for defense. Outside the door slowly emerged a cyborg that looked to be only half the height of a human. The cyborg was startled by Janet and stepped out with his arms raised. Janet "....." The cyborg didn't look too intelligent, similar to the supermarket navigation robots of her day. Janet put down the crowbar and asked it, "Are you a fifth-class citizen?" The cyborg nodded. Sure enough, it was handicapped. Janet: "Me too." It had no voice capabilities. The light screen on its face showed the word "Roxy." That was its name. Janet replied to it, "My name is Janet." The light screen on Roxy's face turned into a smiley face; it looked happy now. Janet suddenly thought of a question and asked, "Do you pick up trash around here?" Janet guessed that Roxy was probably developed as a trash removal robot. Because Roxy's development was flawed, it was discarded here. Roxy nodded her head. Janet asked, "Have you seen anyone suspicious?" Roxy "You." "...." Janet "Besides me?" Roxy: "No." Janet asked, "Is there surveillance in the neighborhood?" Roxy: "No." Okay. This place was an abandoned garbage dump. Surely, there wouldn't be any surveillance. Janet was disappointed that she hadn't found any valid clues. Roxy could tell Janet wasn't too happy and typed on the light screen, "But I do." "Really?" says Janet, interested. Roxy slowly typed a line on the light screen: "Cyborg camera on by default." Cyborgs were developed with cameras as standard. The camera is the "two eyes" of the robot. Even if the machine is scrapped, the camera function of many robots can be used. So, despite the mountains of garbage here, it's likely that many of the cameras are still in operation. The murderer probably knew a lot about killing people but not about cyborgs. He would have chosen something other than the garbage room. In other words, as long as the camera of a specific scrapped robot was working here, it could record the entire process of the original owner's death. Janet asked excitedly, "Can you help me find the robot's camera?" Roxy: "I can't; there's too much trash here." There's a mountain of garbage here. If Roxy wanted to sift through the undamaged cameras, then export the data and analyze the clues. This whole process would take at least two months. "Roxy," Janet squatted across from Roxy with a crowbar in hand, leveled with it, and said with a smirk on her face, "Do you want to make a deal with me?" Roxy: "What is it?"